In many situations, it is necessary or desirable to transfer data between two or more integrated circuits, or chips. For example, many electronic products are relatively complex, and include multiple integrated circuits, and it is necessary for these to be able to communicate with each other.
The Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Alliance is an organization that is working to define specifications for interfaces to mobile application processors. It is proposed that an inter-chip or inter-integrated circuit bus should be provided for the transfer of digital audio and low speed data. The proposed bus is based on the principle of time division multiple access (TDMA). The proposed bus operates in a synchronous way and comprises a clock line and a data line.
Synchronous TDMA busses are known, but these typically do not provide a flexible scheme for flow-controlled data transmission. For instance AC'97 (“Audio Codec '97, Revision 2.3 Revision 1.0”, Intel, April 2002) provides a very basic method for a pulled data model (Sample on Demand) but does not allow UART emulation for instance. The S/PDIF interface (Sony/Philips Digital Interconnect Format, also IEC 958 type II, which is part of the IEC-60958 standard) and the McBSP interface of Texas Instruments do not provide flow control mechanisms.